Speed Up Your Hearing

We surf the net with our eyes, ears and fingers. Eyes offer the largest conduit and while podcasting and audio books just use ears, the ears are best suited for hands-free operation. In addition -- a big plus -- we think better when active because more blood gets to our heads. Also, listening at faster speeds causes a listener to focus more intently on what's being said. Listening at normal speed is then like watching football played at a walking pace.

Podcast playback is a process that can be adjusted for speed and pitch correction to prevent the chipmonk effect. Many devices, including the iPhone, other smart phones, iPad, iRiver and some Samsung prodcuts, have settings or apps that speed up playback. The latest free device for the blind and handicapped provided by the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS) also does this. Of course you have to be qualified to get one.

You should know that automatic pitch control does exist, just not on portable players. The Windows Media Player is the gold standard in this area. A right click on a running file in the Media Player brings up a menu with Enhancements that opens another menu with speed control that does automatically correct and does this easily up to twice the normal speed. Some new flash players do this, too.

You can convert an audio file to play faster, with pitch correction, and to be smaller so more podcasts fit on a portable player. You can't transform a file using Windows Media Player, but Audacity can. How you do this, shown below, comes from kristarella.com. and Seymour Cat

“For this exercise I used the change speed, change pitch and amplify effects.

“To start, I opened the mp3 file in Audacity. In the above image I’ve already selected the part of the file that I wanted by dragging the mouse across it, and removed the rest with the trim outside selection button.

If you select "Effect > Change Tempo" instead of "Effect > Change Speed" you can speed the audio up without changing the pitch of the voices, saving yourself a second round of audio processing to fix the chipmunk element. In the example above setting the marker to get 105.883 produced a file that played twice as fast (half the time) with no chipmunking. Speakers and sound quality vary a great deal but are consistent from each source, so you'll have to test different settings of Change Tempo. A one-hour podcast takes a minute to load, thirty seconds to Change Tempo 100% (double playback speed) and a minute to export as a MP3, so each hour takes 2.5 mins to process.

“It can also be handy to use Effect > Amplify to make the file a bit louder; some lecturers are softly spoken.”

You can process single files using Audacity, but not batches. Right now only commercial batch processors are available to do this. If you download seventy or eighty files each week, a commercial batch processor may be your only convenient solution.

Why even do this? Well, it means you can listen to a sixteen-hour book in eight. If you commute twenty hours a week, you can listen to forty hours of lectures. Recorded radio programs can be shrunk in size and more quickly reviewed. Many audio files discuss the mountain of new knowledge created each year. In the biomedical field alone over 100,000 papers are produced annually in the United States. Some of these netcasts provide summaries while others include in-depth discussions by experts. The more you can process the more productive and informed you'll be. The concept was important enough that Brigham Young University considered producing videocasts of lectures that could be played back at higher speeds (http://www.enounce.com/docs/BYUPaper020319.pdf). That was some years back. Recently the same approach was used by the Linux Foundation in a free introductory course, LFS101x.

Speed listening may not appeal to some any more than speed reading does, yet speed listening is much easier to apply. You just need to focus more on what's said. In fact, speeding up speech can make a subject more interesting. We can easily listen to speech at 250 words a minute, but public speech is often quite slow, about 150 words a minute. Listening speeds up to 500 words a minute are possible, but audio quality, accents and clarity of speech (enunciation) make a difference as does the quality of processing.

If you lack sources, over 230 URL's for podcast feeds are listed below. To start with try listening to episode 22 of This Week in Parasitism, a topic with increasing importance as the climate warms. The Naked Scientists based in Britain offers a nice weekly collection of news with a British slant. The Australian Broadcasting Network offers podcasts about intriguing technology being developed there. The Canadian Broadcasting Corp and the BBC also offer podcasts which include new developments in many important areas. Futures in Biotech is discontinued, but still offers terrific interviews of use to students and educators. Netcasts from Mike Tech Show deals mostly with maintenance and troubleshooting computers and their systems. The Med School Hq produces podcasts about and for those interested in medical careers. Econtalk deals with economics and will change your belief that it's dry and boring with outstanding interviews about developments and history. Two other sources with outstanding products are Sound Investing and RadioLab. And, they are all free! Here's a link to an Opml file that contains them all and can be imported into aggregators such as Juice. Or here's a free list of descriptions and links for over 7000 podcasts, and here's a link where they can all be downloaded for a total of 45GB.

Now there is another process also available which I run on Audiobooks - (and this can also be taken for Podcasts) Read on ..

Different Narrators talk in different ways - some are just down right painful to listen to (taking a long time and ruining a good book (or topic) - Some Narrators are brilliant bringing feeling, energy, life and are better than actually reading it yourself plus they can read quickly but these are usually expensive as they have had training.)

The cheap narrators are useless ..... but can be improved.

Speaking a passage is actually made up of both the spoken words and the gaps. Some narrators leave huge gaps.

ALSO - WE ALL LISTEN DIFFERENTLY - Some happily zoom through very fast spoken words but need gaps and some others like more normal words but happily shrink the gaps.

AUDACITY Provides the facility to ensure you get the fastest, most exciting, best MP3 to keep you interested and tailored just for you.

To reduce gaps to not waste time then Audacity handles this and its called :_
- TRUNCATE SILENCE (available under EFFECT) this reduces gaps (Db silence / time / to what you feel works for you.
- Also TEMPO is available to shorten the overall time for the passage without raising the Narrators Pitch.
- So it's best to create a few different Chains for different Narrators and save these - After a few books you get to know just the right Speedup to apply.
( I have about 4 different Chains for varying Truncate Silences + another 6 different chains for varying Tempo and another 5 chains which have a mixture of both - All will shorten the Audiobook but at some point it will become TOO SHORT and no longer enjoyable. The objective is to get it just right.

at Audacity Forum (Thanks Steve)and you too can get
1. More enjoyable Audio
2. Much faster Audio.
3. Get through books or learning quicker.
Any probs get in touch .:) ........ (Oh I've tested the MP3 Speedup available on MP3 Players but they are Total Rubbish )

There is another way that is even easier because it is automatic. I've been using the Android app BeyondPod for a few years and love several features. One of them is the ability to set the playback speed to the faster desired level for any podcast subscription.

[quote]"To change the speed you need to select the whole file (represented as wav peaks) and go to Effect > Change Speed…... I dragged the blue cursor up so that I was changing the speed by about 50%. I find that to be a reasonable increase while still being able to understand the words. You could play with the speed to see how fast your file needs to go."

“If you play back your file as is, you’ll find it fairly difficult to understand because of the chipmunk element, it also sounds pretty funny. Go to Effect > Change Pitch…. Drag the blue cursor like for the speed, but this time take it down about 30%. I find with a 50% increase in speed, a 30% decrease in pitch makes the speaker sounds fairly normal.[/quote]

That's not needed. If you select "Effect > Change Tempo" instead of "Effect > Change Speed" you can speed the audio up without changing the pitch of the voices, saving yourself a second round of audio processing to fix the chipmunk element.